Everything Under the Sun

January | Wisdom |   Week 4 | 1/29/2023 Learnings:   What are your most critical learnings of the last 5 years?   When I reflect on the last 5 years of my life, ages 22 to 27, I'm flooded with many important milestones, memories and turning points. The last 5 years of my life form a long, winding road, broken in many places, arriving at the position that I now occupy in time. I remain on that same road today. I think about the friendships I've fostered, the relationships that have come and gone, the different cities I've seen and lived in. I think of the brutish relics on my abdomen, from a not so distant hell. I think of the mundane and the extraordinary, the happiness and the sadness, and the whole spectrum of color that populates a lifetime. All of these concepts, these learnings, these people and these places - they're on that road.  The question of Week 4 is "What are your most critical learnings of the last 5 years?" I chose 11 learnings to highlight in ...

January | Wisdom |   Week 3 | 1/22/2023 Cinema and Literature: What are the best movies, television and books you've consumed?  Growing up in a family of cinephiles, it was a regular occurrence on Friday or Saturday night, to get the family together and watch a movie. Hailing from a half-Italian background, my family was big on mob movies. My favorite was Goodfellas, but I've seen them all: Godfather, Raging Bull, Casino, A Bronx Tale. As I grew older, my favorite movies quickly became anything and everything done by Christopher Nolan: Inception, Interstellar, the Dark Knight Trilogy. But one movie that radically changed my thinking and tested my cognitive development was Ex Machina; the story of a programmer who is sent to conduct a Turing Test (or what he believes is a Turing Test) on a supposedly sentient Artificial Intelligence system. Without spoiling the movie, you find yourself captivated, confused, and on edge as you conduct the Turing Test right alongside the pr...

January | Wisdom |   Week 2 | 1/13/2023 Individuals: Who are the most important figures in your life? When I was in 5th grade, we had an assignment, called the Tropicana Speech (appropriately Florida- named). It was a simple assignment; write a speech and present it to the class. Some kids told a funny story about their dog, others chose to talk about a place they love to go with their friends. I wrote a speech on why Ronald Reagan was the greatest president. At the tender age of 11 I'd decided he was an important figure. I'd read a book on his presidency. I'd seen highlights of his greatest speeches. Probably influenced by my father, I held Reagan in high regard - here was someone masculine, articulate, strong, and influential. He "won" the Cold War. He'd been a movie star, a governor and the President. He appeared kind, witty, patriotic and he possessed a strength of spirit that was palpable in his words. Something about this cocktail of attributes, accompli...

January | Wisdom | Week 1 | 1/5/2023 Sourcing: How important is the search for wisdom in your life, and where do you find it? Looking around my 750 square foot apartment in Charlotte, there isn't a whole lot of space on the walls, but what space is available, I've populated with as much wisdom as possible. To my right, within viewing distance of my desk, there are two pieces of paper taped to the wall. On them, 50 Stoic Rules, which I took from an Instagram post by Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic). #4, "Think progress, not perfection." To my left, stands a seven foot book shelf with books on topics ranging from psychology to astrophysics. Classics like Animal Farm sit next to yet-to-be-declared classics like The Power of Now. Inside my bedroom two posters hang, each a cover art for a Jordan Peterson book; 12 Rules for Life: The Antidote to Chaos and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules, littered with bits of wisdom like Rule #7, "Pursue what is meaningful, not what is exp...

January 3rd, 2023 At the start of each year, most people enthusiastically contrive a New Years Resolution. The prototypical makeup of any given resolution falls into three categories, [1] healthier living (eating, sleeping, exercise), [2] skill acquisition/improvement, or [3] self-growth (relationship, travel, family). Most resolutions last about 4 weeks. To be vocally self-critical, I've been guilty of this many times. Aware of the vacuum of self-discipline embedded in the modern human condition, some people instead pick a single word for the year to meditate on, both daily and situationally, at the precipice of decisions or in moments of stillness. Others - the "free thinker" types - consciously avoid any novel behavior or action-based decree for the new year out of defiance for the "artificial nature of time". Everyone has their schtick.  I learned recently of a man who wrote an autobiography in a very interesting way. Every Sunday, his son called him with a ...